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Assumption (1): God exists.

        Assumption (1a): God desires that people be aware of his existence.

        Assumption (1b): God desires that people worship him in specific ways.

        Assumption (1c): God has the ability to make his presence obvious and explain clearly what he desires.

Premise (2): God's presence is not obvious in the world.

Premise (3): Many people do not believe in God because of a lack of evidence.

Premise (4): Many people who do believe in God do not agree on what he desires, because of a lack of evidence.

Premise (5): For God to make his premise obvious and explain his desires would remedy both (3) and (4), without having any significant negative side effects.

Conclusion (6): If God exists, he would make his premise obvious in the world and explain what he desires. (from (1),(5))

Contradiction: But no such thing has happened. (from (2))

Conclusion (7): God does not exist. (from (6),(2))

If the flaw of the ontological argument is circularity, the fallacy of the cosmological argument is special pleading. Namely, it asserts without good reason that everything except God needs a cause. But why should this be? If anything can exist without a cause, we could just as well conclude that it is the universe itself that is uncaused, existing eternally and giving rise to all other cause and effect. This hypothesis has just as much explanatory power as the hypothesis that God created the universe, and it is more parsimonious, requiring fewer additional assumptions. Therefore, all other things being equal, it is to be preferred.

Even if we accept this argument's logic, all it proves is that there was a first cause. It does not prove that this first cause still exists today; it does not prove that this first cause has any interest in or awareness of human beings; it does not prove that this first cause is omnipotent or omniscient or benevolent. It does not even prove that the first cause is conscious or a person. An atheist could accept this entire chain of logic and then posit that the first cause was a purely natural phenomenon.

Next, premise 4 holds that anything that begins to exist has a cause of its existence. But we already know that this is not true. Strange as it seems, science has discovered some natural objects that come into being uncaused. One such class of object is called virtual particles. According to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, the product of energy and time must always be greater than a certain constant; therefore, as we examine apparently empty space over shorter and shorter time scales, we discover increasingly violent, and increasingly brief, fluctuations of energy. Since energy is equivalent to matter by E = mc², on time scales that are sufficiently short these fluctuations can be so violent as to create actual particles that exist for only a fleeting instant before returning to nothingness. These particles are not merely a hypothetical construct: they produce detectable effects that can be, and have been, experimentally measured. However, there is literally no specific cause of their existence. Nor is this phenomenon merely an inconsequential anomaly. Some physicists have proposed hypotheses in which a similar phenomenon, under the right circumstances, could have given rise to our universe.

Assumption (1): God exists.

        Assumption (1a): God is all-knowing.

        Assumption (1b): God is all-powerful.

        Assumption (1c): God is perfectly loving.

        Assumption (1d): Any being that did not possess all three of the above properties would not be God.

Premise (2): Evil exists.

Premise (3): An all-knowing being would be aware of the existence of evil.

Premise (4): An all-powerful being would be able to eliminate evil.

Premise (5): A perfectly loving being would desire to eliminate evil.

Conclusion (6): Evil does not exist. (from (1),(3),(4),(5))

Contradiction: But evil does exist. (from (2))

Conclusion (7): There is no being that is all-knowing, all-powerful, and perfectly loving. (from (2),(3),(4),(5))

Conclusion (8): God does not exist. (from (7),(1d))

Divine command morality, by contrast, is lacking because it offers no better reason to behave than the promise of reward and the threat of punishment - in other words, a carrot and stick. It assumes that people are basically immoral and cannot be trusted to do right unless they are lured into it, nor can they be trusted to abstain from wrong unless they are frightened away from it. It postulates that, like untrained animals, we have to be constantly chastised by a transcendent lawgiver whenever we stray from the straight and narrow

If a theist's fear of divine punishment is the only thing preventing him from doing evil to everyone around him, or if he would never do any good deeds if he didn't expect to get something in return, then such a person isn't really very moral at all, is he?